Tom Mathews’s Reviews > The Killing Hills > Status Update

Mick continued east, thinking about the Caudill brothers, Virgil and Boyd. He wondered if every family history was that sad, or just in the hills. Appalachian people lived by old codes that compelled them to take action. Affronts were always personal. Acts of vengeance maintained themselves through generations.

A sense of despair settled over him like a quilt made of concrete.

Wilson looked at Mick as if he were a pup who’d shit on the porch.

Four had brightly dyed hair. The other two, male and female, wore their hair in short mohawks greased to a woodpecker’s crest. In the way of small-town rebels everywhere, they conformed to each other. Mick wondered who owned the car, who paid for the gasoline and hair dye.

He had often imagined a life like this for Peggy and himself—finishing their days side by side on a porch, quietly enjoying the birds, trees, and flowers. He wanted to measure time by the growth of trees.

He drove to Bob’s, a gas station that sold milk, eggs, cigarettes, and fishing tackle. A shelf held a row of orange life-preservers inside plastic bags covered in dust, evidence that people in the hills were less concerned with drowning than spending money. As his grandfather said, people who can’t swim should stay off a lake.

The older two boys were lost to her—one to the graveyard and the other stationed at Camp Pendleton in San Diego. For a while she worried about him in California with all those serial killers and vegetarians but she figured a Marine could take care of himself.

Shifty Kissick made her bed every morning, careful not to let the pillows rest on each other lest such a sight be too suggestive of sexual conduct.

Mick’s great-grandfather had built the four-room cabin by hand, solid construction with corners that still held true, the walls plumb, a floor as level as water. He’d picked this place due solely to the rough terrain. The hills were too steep and the hollers too narrow to log the woods...The two old men taught Mick all they knew about the woods, wisdom that ran back to the Great Depression.